communications network onto those systems.”
“No kidding,” Bennett said. He looked frustrated. “None of it makes any sense. Why go to so much trouble to protect just one man, even if he is a top-notch weapons scientist?”
“I’m beginning to think we’re looking at something bigger than that,”
Randi told him grimly. “Much bigger.” She nodded toward the analyst’s computer. “How far did you get before Renke’s friends pulled their disappearing act?”
“Not far enough,” Bennett admitted. “I thought I was seeing some significant patterns in the data, but I can’t be sure of how close I was to the core.”
“Show me,” Randi ordered.
Quickly, the CIA specialist called up the results of his work, displaying them graphically on his screen as a series of separate circles?groups of apparently related phone numbers ?with thicker or thinner lines showing the frequency of calls made betw een them. Each circle also carried a tag identifying the approximate geographic location assigned to each set of numbers.
Randi studied the layout carefully, seeing the patterns Bennett had uncovered. Most of the calls made using this secret network seemed to originate in either one of two places. Moscow was the first. She nodded to herself. No real surprise there, considering Wulf Renke’s past affiliations. But the second concentration seemed to make far less sense. It showed a flurry of phone calls made from and to Italy, especially to a group of numbers registered in a section of Umbria, north of Rome.
Umbria, she thought, bewildered. That was a region of ancient hill towns, olive groves, and vineyards. What could be so important to Renke or his backers in Umbria?
“Ms. Russell?”
Randi looked away from the screen. One of the junior-grade CIA officers attached to the Berlin Station stood there. Like her murdered lookout, he was another of the many highly intelligent, but woefully inexperienced rookies who had been rushed through training at Camp Peary after 9/1I as the Agency rushed to rebuild its human intelligence capabilities. She searched her tired mind for his name and found it. Flores. Jeff Flores. “What is it, Jeff?”
“You asked me to work on that scrap of paper you found on Lange,” the young man said quietly.
She nodded. Besides Lange’s passport, wallet, and phone, that torn and badly blackened bit of paper had been the only piece of hard evidence that she had rescued from the chaos inside Kessler’s villa. Unfortunately, that piece of paper had seemed completely worthless as a source of information.
At first glance, it was much too scorched to be legible. “Were you able to make out anything?”
He looked worried. “It would be simpler to show you what I found.” The younger man glanced cautiously at Bennett. “In my office, I mean.”
Curbing her impatience, Randi followed him down the embassy’s third-floor corridor to a small windowless cubicle. Flores’s desk and a locked filing cabinet for classified disks and documents took up most of the floor space.
She looked around with a dry smile. “Nice digs, Jeff. It’s always a delight to see patriotism and self-sacrifice rewarded.”
He grinned back, but his eyes were still troubled. “My instructors out at the Farm always told me that you got a choice after putting in your first hventy years in clandestine work: either the Medal of Freedom or a desk with a view.”
“Hate to break it to you the hard way,” Randi told him, “but they were Pulling your leg. It takes at least thirty years of service to get a window.”
She turned serious. “Now fill me in on this document that has you so spooked.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said. “I scanned that paper, or what was left of it, into our system here. Once it was in digital form, I was able to do a pretty decent job of washing off the burn marks electronically and then enhancing what was left. I’ve recovered about forty percent of the original text.”
“And?”
Flores entered his combination for his filing cabinet and pulled out a single sheet. “This is a printout of what I could read.”
Randi studied it in silence. It seemed to be part of a long list of license plates and various car and truck makes and models. Her eyes narrowed. Several of those plate numbers and descriptions sounded familiar. Then her eye dropped down the list to SILVER AUDI A4 SEDAN, BERLIN LICENSE: B AM 2506. She had walked by that car yesterday evening, sitting with a bullet hole in the rear window and the body of poor Carla Voss splayed across the steering wheel.
She looked up suddenly in shock.
“They’re all ours,” Flores confirmed. “Every single one of those vehicles is either leased to or owned by the Agency and assigned to the Berlin Station.”
“Christ,” Randi murmured. “No wonder Renke’s hit team spotted us so easily.” Her jaw tightened as she tried to control her growing anger. “Who could put together a list like this?”
Flores swallowed hard. He looked as though he had a bad taste in his mouth. “It would have to be somebody here, someone in the Station itself, I mean. Or back at Langley. Or else with the BfV.”
“The BfV?”
“Germany is an allied host country,” the young man pointed out. “It’s policy to keep their counterintelligence folks posted on most of our activities.”
“Just peachy,” Randi said acidly. “Now, who else knows about this?”
“No one.”
Randi nodded. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.” She picked up the printout.
“I’ll take this copy, Jeff. And I want the original, too. Make sure you wipe everything else you’ve done off your hard drive. If anyone else asks, you play dumb. Tell them you didn’t make any progress and then I pulled you off the assignment. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said somberly.
Randi stared down at the damning list in her hands. Another pattern, a very ugly pattern of betrayal and treachery, was becoming disturbingly clear.
Someone with access to the results of her hunt for Wulf Renke was working for the enemy.
President Sam Castilla listened with increasing concern to Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In preparation for tomorrow’s secret conference with America’s allies, he had asked the admiral to brief him on the latest warning signs that the U.S. militarv was beginning to detect in and around the Russian Federation. The president needed to be able to make the strongest possible case and nothing he heard was particularly helpful in that. But neither was it reassuring. Although no one inside the Pentagon was very happy with the overall quality of intelligence available to them, it was clear now that growing numbers of Russia’s best- equipped and trained army and aviation units had completely dropped off the Defense Department’s situation maps.
“Meaning what, exactly?” Castilla asked.
“Put bluntly, Mr. President, we don’t have the faintest idea of where these divisions and other combat units are right now, where they’re headed, or what thev might be planning.”
“How many soldiers are we talking about here?”
“At least one hundred and fifty thousand troops, thousands of armored vehicles and self-propelled guns, and hundreds of front-line fighters and bombers,” Brose told him grimly.
“Enough to start one hell of a war,” the president said slowly.
“Maybe several wars,” Brose admitted. “At least given the relative combat power of the other countries around Russia. Of all the former Soviet republics, only the Ukrainians have a reasonably strong and well-equipped army and air force.”
“Or they would, if it weren’t for the fact that their best leaders have been hit by this damned disease,” Castilla realized.
Brose nodded his large head ponderously. “Yes, sir, that’s true. Right now, from what I’ve seen of the confusion they’re in, the Ukrainians would have a devil of a time putting up much of a fight. As for the rest?” He shrugged.
